Mary Ann Hall purchased a home in 1840 on land where the National Museum of the American Indian is today. Her three-story home became the site of a high end brothel for the District. Archaeologists excavated fragments of champagne bottles, oyster…

Margaret Bayard Smith was a writer and a vital figure in the early social life of Washington, DC. Her letters and diaries provide some of the best descriptions of early Washington. In 1837 she recorded what the Mall looked like when she and her…

Alethia Browning Tanner was an enslaved woman who ran her own vegetable market in Lafayette Square in front of the White House during the late 1700s and early 1800s. She was highly successful, counting President Thomas Jefferson among her customers.…

Diana lived with her father and stepmother at the White House from 1940-1943, when her father, Harry Hopkins, served as a close adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Diana participated in the Easter Egg Roll each year that she lived in the…

The Baltimore and Potomac Railway Station was built in 1873, over the old Tiber Creek and Washington City Canal waterway on the present-day site of the National Gallery of Art. Building contractors sank 35-foot piles to secure the foundation of the…

The Washington City Canal ran for approximately two miles of canal through Washington from the present day Navy Yard, across the Capitol grounds, and down present day Constitution Avenue. Completed in 1815, the Canal incorporated Tiber Creek near…

The Bureau of Printing and Engraving is one of two sites in the United States where currency is produced (the other is in Fort Worth, Texas). The Bureau has been printing money here since 1880. Prior to that, currency was printed by private companies…

Once the largest commercial market in Washington, Center Market opened in 1801. The original buildings were replaced in 1872 by a building designed by Adolph Cluss. The market was close to the Washington City Canal, railroads, and streetcar lines. It…

Built between 1832 and 1833, the Lockkeeper's House was the home of the toll keeper who collected tolls from those traveling along the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal Extension. Some accounts report that a resident lockkeeper and his family of 13…

Generations of children climbed on Uncle Beazley, a fiberglass triceratops, who lived on the National Mall in front of the Museum of Natural History. For a slow-moving dinosaur, Uncle Beazley is widely traveled. Before coming to the Mall in the…